‘The Dark Tower’ Weighs in at a Lean 95 Minutes

With movies seemingly getting longer by the second after Michael Bay and his ilk ushered in a new and exhausting runtime era, lights in the bloated darkness can come from the most unexpected of places. The Dark Tower, for example, is only 95 minutes long — for those of you who, like me, don’t understand what that means unless it’s in hours, that equates to an hour and 35 minutes. Which is less than two hours!

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is anything but brief, but the first few books in the sequence are actually pretty short, so this makes some sense. It’s clear that the movie version will be switching main plot points of the series around a bit (as the Gunslinger himself doesn’t enter our world until the second book), plus there are a lot of ideas to get across, like who Roland Deschain is, who the Man in Black is, and what makes this Tower so important anyway. But a shorter runtime (per the British Board of Film Classification) is probably the best way to introduce this story to the big screen. Let’s just hope it’s done right.

There are other worlds than these. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, the ambitious and expansive story from one of the world’s most celebrated authors, makes its launch to the big screen. The last Gunslinger, Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), has been locked in an eternal battle with Walter O’Dim, also known as the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey), determined to prevent him from toppling the Dark Tower, which holds the universe together. With the fate of the worlds at stake, good and evil will collide in the ultimate battle as only Roland can defend the Tower from the Man in Black.